The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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By means of alcohol, possibly a drug, and trickery, the main character wakes up the next day with Jean de Gue's luggage and clothes, finds that his doppelganger has vanished, and that he is being picked up by de Gue's faithful servant. Will John fool them all and turn his madcap Shadow's Evil plans into Good - and finally give his own life purpose in the process? possessed by a reckless feeling I had never known before, the sensation that I myself did not matter any more. John agrees to go for a drink with Jean but falls into a drunken stupor and wakes up in a hotel room to find that Jean has disappeared, taking John's clothes and identity documents with him! From this religious tradition developed the meaning of a person, group or thing who takes the blame for the mistakes or crimes of others.

But before writing it, she became distracted by a number of incidents that happened to her in France, which inspired the plot of The Scapegoat, published in 1957. John soon feels he is out of his depth: “ I had plunged into this unknown world like a reckless walker into a morass, each step taking him deeper, each wild flounder committing him more inescapably” [Daphne du Maurier, 1957: 203]. He has inherited a troubled family, a struggling business, and another life to one side of that, all rooted in and shaped by a history that he knows nothing about. I don’t remember which book I read first, but I remember that I was captivated, and that I picked up another, and another, and another ….John gets himself entangled in a play of another’s making and is becoming both an actor and a director: “As a stranger I was like a spectator at a play, but I was also in a sense a producer too: circumstances were forcing them to follow my lead, and upon my actions would depend their own” [du Maurier, 1957: 236]. The story follows John, who tries his best to live his doppelgänger's life without making too many missteps or being discovered as a fraud. Naturally, they expect him to continue running the family glass-making business and arranging shooting parties - things that John has absolutely no experience in. John, a discontented English academic travelling in France meets an unhappy Frenchman who, by chance, is his doppelganger.

John persuades the mother to resume her position at the head of the family and give up the morphine. To be honest I watched the movie "The Scapegoat" from 2012 and preferred the ending of this story much more, but probably not as realistic as du Maurier's ending. In Rebecca the most powerful presence in the house is that of one absent person – the first Mrs de Winter. There is a bit of an anticlimax at the end, and du Maurier did not quite manage to suspend our disbelief completely regarding this situation of two compete look alikes, who speak different languages, not only meeting but then one’s family mistaking a stranger for its own family member, inviting him home.It was a butterfly, the last of the long summer, woken by sunshine, seeking escape from the cobwebs that imprisoned it. It starts well, with an unassuming Englishman falling victim to stolen identity, and he is being forced to play a role of deception. Like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel [1951], The Scapegoat puts that haunting spell on the reader with its penetrating character study, its delicious suspense and its brooding atmosphere.

Indeed in her own life, she seems to have had an almost obsessive love for her "Menabilly" the house she rented for so many years. I've come across many dislikable characters in Daphne du Maurier's books, but I've not met a bunch like in here, not quite.The edition I got was by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and it was already in its 5th printing. They have treated him variously with the emotions he has seemed to lack in his life so far; that is with love or hatred, but rarely with indifference. I don’t fancy all of them, but I’d put this up there with Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel and above Jamaica Inn which was a bit too disturbing for me! In fact it is neither a straightforward adventure story as in Anthony Hope's tale, nor a dark study of two individuals; personalities within the same body, as in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror story.